


Confirmed Cryptid: Black Paladin

by GriffinRose



Series: The Black Paladin [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Galra POV, Gen, Haunting, scared galra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-03-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 18:36:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10471443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GriffinRose/pseuds/GriffinRose
Summary: Companion piece to my The Black Paldin fic! You don't necessarily have to read that to understand and enjoy what's happening here.Shiro is stuck on a Galra warship, and he's enjoying every minute of it. The poor Galra soldiers, however, are not. Demon legends have to come from somewhere, after all. The galra were not happy to possibly find a source of those legends. Just what exactly is the Black Paladin of Voltron?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so to catch anyone up who has not read my other fic, Shiro has the ability to phase through solid objects thanks to his connection with the Black Lion. During my fic he ends up captured on a Galra warship, but doors and walls don't mean much when you can pass through them. Shiro gets some well-deserved payback on the Galra. This is chapter eighteen from the Galra's POV.

Confirmed Cryptid: Black Paladin

 

Being a Galra soldier meant there was a lot of routines and expectations. You woke up early and trained, ate a nutritious breakfast, and then performed whatever duties you were assigned to that day, being it patrol duty or some other mission. Most of the time, it was honestly kind of dull.

 

The crew of T40280K wished it had stayed that way.

 

They were patrolling the perimeter of the Olkarin system; Voltron had allied with Olkari, and while there was nothing to be done about that, now, they could at least limit the trade Olkari was allowed access to. There was more than one way to conquer a planet, after all.

 

They’d been there for a handful of quintants already, and so far the most exciting thing had been a far off star going super nova. Most of the crew slept through it.

 

Then their scanners picked up a fugitive ship. The hum of impending battle seeped under their skin. Most of the men wanted the ship to fight. They’d been inactive for too long.

 

They didn’t get a fight. The ship was apparently holding the Black Paladin of Voltron. Why, none of them could understand. Perhaps they knew Olkari was being strictly monitored and had hoped to sneak in undetected on some random ship, in the hopes that the Galra would be none the wiser about their communication with the Olkarians.

 

Whatever the reason, it hardly mattered. They used the tractor beam to pull the paladin in when he jumped out into space in nothing but his flight suit, and then he was quickly locked up and they were headings towards Zarkon’s central command.

 

It did not take long for news to travel through the ship. They had captured the _Black Paladin_ , the leader of Voltron. They were all bound to be promoted and honored for this.

 

Things went wrong very fast.

 

No one even knew what happened. The ship just suddenly stopped in the middle of space. The lights flickered briefly, but then everything was back to normal.

 

The men gathered in the mess hall glanced at one another. No alarms were forthcoming, so they weren’t under attack. They shrugged and went back to their meals.

 

“ _Attention, all personnel, the Black Paladin has escaped! Capture him at all costs!_ ” Commander Grisbov shouted.

 

The men jumped from their seats, food forgotten. The chase was on.

 

Xx

 

Ryzax wasn’t a gullible man. Practical jokes never worked on him, and he’d never believed in superstitious nonsense. That was the nice thing about being a soldier; the universe existed in black and white. He had orders, and he followed them. Galra training was pretty extensive, and he felt pretty prepared for any situation.

 

The Black Paladin _rising through the floor_ and then continuing up to _pass through the ceiling_ was not something that had ever been covered in training. They’d never come across a species able to pass through solid objects before. It just wasn’t possible. Solid matter couldn’t pass through more solid matter, that was just physics.

 

He must have hallucinated it. Breakfast had tasted off this morning, and he had been staying up late the past few nights. Yeah, that was it.

 

“ _Ryzax, report!”_ His commander yelled in his helmet.

 

He stood frozen another moment. “Sector C308 is clear, sir,” he reported.

 

He hadn’t seen anything.

 

Xx

 

Searching the whole ship for one escaped prisoner was a pain. Glaslaw would rather have finished his lunch, but when the commander ordered a search they jumped and asked where.

 

It was just annoying when the answer was _everywhere_.

 

He kept his blaster primed and ready, but his levels of alertness were lacking. He was on the far side of the ship, the prisoner couldn’t have possibly gotten anywhere near here, not with the amount of soldiers and drones he would have had to go through.

 

The ship jerked to a stop and turned violently, and Glaslaw slammed into the wall. They were turning around? Why the Quiznak were they turning around? That didn’t make any sense.

 

Unless…the prisoner had gotten into the command center. And not only that, but he’d taken control. Just who was this guy? How had he gotten past all those commanding officers?

 

Glaslaw righted himself and glanced around the abandoned hallway. There was something unnatural about this prisoner. Not just anyone could escape and take over the command center.

 

A few dobashes later, a voice came over the PA system. _“The prisoner has infiltrated the command center and killed all senior officers. Captain Xalyax is now in charge of the ship. The prisoner has also depleted our fuel system and must be captured at all costs.”_

 

Captain Xalyax? They were all the way down to captain? The prisoner had managed to kill ten commanding officers, commandeer the ship, _and_ not be captured?

 

Was he even real?

 

Xx

 

Galra didn’t do fear. The word was barely in their vocabulary. And when you’ve lived as long as Blathav had, there wasn’t much left to surprise or scare you. Honestly, anyone who can race through the Traxim system and emerge unscathed didn’t really need to fear anything ever again.

 

And Blathav had done just that. He was older than most, had lived through more than a lot of these new recruits could even imagine. An escaped prisoner wasn’t a big deal. Rare, sure, but they had a system for this. They used to run drills all the time.

 

A prisoner taking temporary command of the ship was new, though. It may have been short-lived, but Blathav had never even heard of that happening. Usually prisoners went right for the escape pods, and they almost never made it that far. Right there, that made this prisoner unique.

 

He hated unique things. They were unpredictable, difficult to figure out how to take down. He had no history to go off of. It made him uneasy.

 

He stomped through the halls, unhappy with the whole situation. If these new recruits weren’t so horribly trained, this never would have happened. The new training was too soft. Back in his day, the entire crew would have been flogged for not recapturing the prisoner already, and then they’d have been sent back out to capture him. And they wouldn’t be allowed to eat until they did so, even if it took days.

 

Darkness surrounded him. “What the…”

 

The backup lights came on briefly before those too shut down.

 

Blathav blinked. It did not help his sudden blindness. What just happened?

 

Wait, there were footsteps behind him. He turned and fired blindly. The shot was off, but the laser at least illuminated a retreating figure on the far end of the hallway. He adjusted his aim and fired again.

 

There was no one there this time, even though there were no doorways or intersections for them to have disappeared down.

 

Galra didn’t do fear. Unease, however, was allowed, and right now Blathav was very, very uneasy.

 

Xx

 

“Stupid prisoner, escaping during lunch,” Hyszat muttered. “Who even let him out, anyway? And who turned the heat down, Quiznak.”

 

Hyszat was the type of Galra with smooth skin and leathery ears, meaning the cold affected him much sooner than his fur-covered compatriots. It was a constant battle with his roommate, and ultimately who ever went to bed last had the final say over the temperature in the room for the night. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said his roommate had found the ship’s main thermal regulator and knocked it down. But even his roommate knew better than to mess with something like that.

 

He let his blaster fall in one hand and shook out the fingers on his other hand. If they didn’t turn the heat back up, his fingers would freeze before he could shoot anything, and there was no way he was going to get punished for an oversight on his superiors’ faults.

 

He turned a corner and found another soldier walking towards him. “Find anything yet?” Hyszat asked. Clearly the other man hadn’t, otherwise there would be a dead or unconscious prisoner in his grasp, but maybe the other man had at least heard something.

 

“No, and I hope I don’t,” he said, glancing over his shoulder.

 

“What kind of soldier are you?” Hyszat asked.

 

“Give me real men and women to fight, not demons like this,” the man said. “Do you know how many men he’s already killed?”

 

Hyszat didn’t know the exact number, but he knew it was in the double digits.

 

“And I talked to the guard outside his cell door. He doesn’t even know how the prisoner got out! He stood in front of the door the whole time, didn’t even know anything was wrong until an officer came by and demanded to know what had happened. The bonds were just lying on the floor, but the cell was empty! This isn’t a prisoner, it’s a demon!”

 

“Get a hold of yourself,” Hyszat said. “There’s no such thing as demons.”

 

“Then how do you explain how he escaped?”

 

“He probably had inside help from that guard.”

 

The man shook his head. “You didn’t see his face. And I heard someone else say the prisoner can just fall right through the floor! He passes through walls like they aren’t even there!”

 

Hyszat had not heard that. “He can what?” No species he’d ever heard of could do that. Just what was their prisoner?

 

“I’m telling you, we’re chasing a demon! Better just to let him off the ship, I say.”

 

“He’s not a demon,” Hyszat said. “And I’m sure there’ll be a great reward for whoever catches him.”

 

“No reward is worth it,” the man said.

 

Hyszat rolled his eyes. “Then you can explain to the captain why you were a coward.”

 

“Excuse me for valuing my life,” he muttered.

 

“Well I’m going on. Either come with me or go hide in a corner.”  

 

“We’re all going to die, mark my words,” the man said. He continued on with his search, going back the way Hyszat had just come from.

 

The lights shut off and blinded them not a moment later, and even the backup lights were shut off.

 

“It’s a demon, I tell you!”

 

Hyszat didn’t want to agree, but the evidence was getting stronger.

 

Xx

 

It had been nothing more than a hunch that led Loxta to the kitchen. There had been reports of men being sucked out through open airlocks, and almost half the ship was stuck with no lights. Not to mention the dropping temperature. The men he passed were getting antsy, muttering about demons and curses.

 

It was all nonsense, of course, but he couldn’t help the fleeting thought that kept circling in his mind. _All nonsense is based in fact_. Demon legends had to come from somewhere, right?

 

He shook it out of his mind. This was a prisoner, a regular lifeform like any other. Well, maybe he wasn’t exactly a prisoner. He seemed to have the run of the ship and was doing what he pleased.

 

That was what led Loxta to the kitchen. It was one of the few parts of the ship still left untouched, and their search efforts were concentrated elsewhere.

 

The hunch paid off, sort of. He glimpsed the prisoner just before getting a face-full of brown mush. He ducked behind a counter and wiped it off, and then he primed his blaster and jumped up. The prisoner smiled, waved, and sank through the floor.

 

Loxta blinked.

 

 _Demon legends had to come from somewhere_. Maybe, just maybe, they’d found one on their very own ship.

 

Xx

 

Prince Lotor was not as convinced that their prisoner was a demon, and he rallied the men long enough to herd the prisoner (demon) to the bottom of the ship. It worked better than they thought it would, and the men were only too happy to let the Prince face off with the demon.

 

The fight was evenly matched for the most part. The men kept the demon from escaping through any normal means, and he was normal enough to not want to just jump into open space.

 

Or at least, they’d _thought_ he was normal enough. But with that damn self-satisfied grin and wave he sank through the floor and out of sight.

 

The men were only too happy to let him go.

 

“After him!” Lotor demanded.

 

“Are you insane?” someone asked. “We should get out of here before he comes back to finish us off!”

 

“You dare question me?” Lotor asked.

 

“Your Highness, with all due respect,” Captain Xalyax said, “Our ship is badly damaged. We are not currently able to contain the Black Paladin. Perhaps the wisest course of action right now is to let him go.”

 

Lotor was clearly unhappy about it, but he relented. “Very well. Get this ship ready as quickly as you can. Scavenge any parts you need from mine that aren’t damaged.”

 

It was the only time the men would never complain about grunt work. If it meant not facing that demon again, they’d gladly do grunt work for the next week.

**Author's Note:**

> This was so much fun to write you have no idea.


End file.
